Need Suggestions for Automated Backup

[Chong Yu Meng]

Thanks Ian ! A bit more detail than I was looking for, but very welcome 
nonetheless !

The reliability problem I had in mind was this : my experience with CDs 
is, out of 10 CD's burned, there's always one that's messed up (i.e. 
buffer underflow/overflow causing the CD to be useless). 

Anyway, I'm still checking out different methods. I've got a really 
thorny problem here because :

1. Money is a real issue. SGD$700 is too much to pay for a backup drive 
and tape
2. Access to the data center is highly restricted, since the terrorist 
arrests in Singapore, so it will be very inconvenient for me to do 
backups physically every day (which is what I may have to do, if I use 
CD's -- the data center people only do tape rotations).

I'm thinking RAID mirroring is probably the way to go, and only do 
weekly backups.

Regards,
pascal chong


Ian Stephen wrote:

>On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 18:39, Chong Yu Meng wrote:
>  
>
>><snip> I was wondering how 
>>good CD-ROM backups are. I haven't heard of anyone using it, and I'm 
>>wondering if it is because they are unreliable. I'm thinking of the 
>>following scheme:
>>
>>1. Tar all files to be archived into a humongous file
>>2. Mount CDROM drive (with blank CD inside)
>>3. Copy humongous tar file to CD
>>4. Unmount CD
>>
>>All operations are to take place possibly around 4am local time.
>>    
>>
>
>I read somewhere recently that CDs may not give reliable backup for as
>long as previously thought.  It was still in terms of years though. 
>Sorry this is so vague, I didn't pay any attention when I read it.
>
>I'm just a simple home/soho user, but after some questions to this list
>I put together a bash script for backups.  Comments/flames welcome.
>
>Starts by deleting files left behind by the last run then goes;
>
># have it check the size to be backed up
>du -c `cat ./Backups/backuplist.txt` > ./Backups/backupsize.txt
>
># get just the total size
>tail -n1 ./Backups/backupsize.txt > ./Backups/backuptotal.txt
>
># read that total size into variables for comparison
>read <./Backups/backuptotal.txt fullsize extraword
>
># compare fullsize of backup to my maximum and quit if too big
>if test $fullsize -gt 800000
>       then echo "Oh crap it's too big! " $fullsize "bytes!"
>            exit
>fi
>
># With old files safely out of the way and size checked
># have find make a TOC for my backup based on
># what directories I've put in backuplist.txt
>
>find `cat ./Backups/backuplist.txt` >> ./Backups/found.txt;
>
># cpio uses find's TOC to create an archive named backup.cpio
># in the Backups directory
>
>cpio -oavBH crc < ./Backups/found.txt > ./Backups/backup.cpio;
>
># bzip2 compresses backup.cpio
>
>bzip2 ./Backups/backup.cpio
>
># make an iso from the bz2 file
>
>mkisofs -r -o ./Backups/backup.iso ./Backups/backup.cpio.bz2
>
># change permissions of the iso so cdrecord can burn it
>
>chmod 666 ./Backups/backup.iso
>
># burn the compressed archive to CD
>
>cdrecord speed=4 dev=0,0,0 ./Backups/backup.iso
>
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